I don’t think the news surprised anyone. Mayfield and Zlovaric struggled to find playing time on a team that wasn’t terribly deep to begin with, and both had been rumored transfer candidates for several months. Their departure nominally hurts Georgia’s depth for next year, but the impact won’t be that severe if neither was expected to play much. We wish both of them well – no one I’ve heard from has anything but good things to say about them as people.

The departures free up two scholarships of course, and Chip Towers takes a look at what Mark Fox might do during the late signing period. Chip’s device of adding Zlovaric and Mayfield to a long line of attrition casts an unfairly negative tone on these departures though. It’s true that attrition has been an almost annual problem for Georgia (and many teams). But the orderly postseason departures of Mayfield and Zlovaric are a lot closer to the Troy Brewer level of rather than analogues to the disruptive loss of key contributors like Takais Brown, Humprey, Mercer, and Singleton. These weren’t troublemakers getting booted; each expressed a desire for more playing time, and it wasn’t going to come at Georgia.

It’s a fact that Fox’s challenge is to fill the remaining roster spots with a higher level of talent. Towers chides Fox by writing, “The late period, by the way, is not when you want to be doing the bulk of your recruiting.” Yes, of course – most of the top talent commits and signs during the early period, and that’s when Fox was still unproven at Georgia and still getting his feet wet in the area. The fact that he has to be so active in the spring is an unfortunate consequence of only being here a year. If he can make some headway in recruiting this spring, he has some tangible results from last season and an energized fan base to take into some very important recruiting battles over the next few years.

Here’s next year’s roster by class, assuming (hoping) that Thompkins stays. The Dawgs could still add freshman or JUCO transfers. You can see that the Dawgs are poised to lose 7 of these 10 after two more years which is why Paul calling the 2011 class “positively enormous” is an understatement. If Fox can’t build continuity in his third and fourth seasons with the upcoming recruiting classes, he’s going to run into many of the same problems escaping the cycle of losing that his predecessor did.